Smooth censorship in Russia

The history of
censorship in Russian media runs for pages and pages. There’s little point
dealing with Soviet censorship here, but the 1990s, which many people remember as a time when press freedom prevailed, are different. Journalists of
the time reminisce about how they used to push bureaucrats’ doors open, the
public officials scared of them: bureaucrats and politicians had never been so vulnerable.

The media, however,
was another part of the country’s terrain of political conflict—just as
articles could be pulled, so could journalists. Take Dmitry Kholodov, for
instance, a journalist for Moskovsky komsomoletswho died as
he collected a booby-trapped suitcase in 1994.
Ministry of Defence officials weren’t pleased with Kholodov’s coverage of army
corruption and, having asked their subordinates to ‘shut him up’, their
subordinates took the order literally.

From 2015,
the 1990s appear mythical, legendary. What’s different about censorship in
today’s Russia is the ambiguity surrounding it. ‘This text isn’t good enough,
we’re not publishing it’ - this is the response you get when trying to
publish on a ‘sensitive’ subject today. And how can you object? Any text can be
better. But this is still a policy of silencing: in different situations, a
text may well reach the front page if not for certain ‘undesirable’
surnames or facts.

The means of control
are simple: the Presidential Administration has an internal political
directorate, and they know all the chief editors. And these officials
occasionally do ring up a media manager or member of the board to express their
dissatisfaction with a specific publication. What happens next depends on the
diplomatic skills of the editor, whether they’re able to defend their
journalist and their content.

Government officials
are the ones who are hard to deal with. Contact with these people isn’t
advertised. ‘Mate, you understand,’ a colleague shrugs, without naming names or
positions. Everybody understands everything, everybody
knows everything, and no one says anything out loud.

When it’s a question
of more minor state institutions, then it gets easier. It’s not just people in
the Kremlin that read the newspapers and websites, it’s the ministries, too.
And if journalists write on ‘sensitive’ themes, then ministry officials often
begin to scrutinise them intensely. My own experience of encounters with the state demonstrates this easily.

In this case, it was
the Interior Ministry, and the first time I encountered active interest in my work
came after the violence in Khimki, near Moscow, in 2010.

The government
planned to build a high-speed motorway connecting St Petersburg and Moscow, and
Khimki forest lay in its path. In protest at the tree-felling operation already
under way, an anarchist group threw bottles and fired rubber bullets at a local
administration building. I was there, and dictated a report to the
Gazeta.ru newsroom.

A few days later,
police officers arrived at my parents’ house, where I’m registered, in order to
interrogate my mother. As it turned out, my telephone had been geo-located in
the Khimki area, and the police had set off for the first address they found.
The next morning there was a scandal, and the police had to apologise, my
colleagues stepped in. Basically, there was maximum solidarity.

The next instance
involved an interview with a radical group in 2011—those same anarchists—who set off a
bomb near a traffic police stop in the Moscow area. Two days later, and we had a visit from an officer from 38 Petrovka Street (Russia’s equivalent
of Scotland Yard). The officer wanted to know how I’d managed to find this
group, as they’d been looking for them for a while. Here, I was protected by the law
on mass media, and I didn’t have to reveal my sources.

On an every day
level, surveillance and control isn’t so terrible. If you work for a national
newspaper, then there’s always an army of lawyers at your service, ready to
attend interrogations with you and defend you in court. Lower down the ladder,
there’s non-governmental organisations ready to help, such as Agora, which has
been helping defend press freedom for activists and journalists since 2005.

What’s more
dangerous, though, are the new laws that are shutting down the
market. At the time, this slips down easily, and doesn’t even look like
expropriation—even though this is what it is. For example, the ban on foreign
citizens owning more than 20% of a media outlet, which led to the departure of
Regina von Flemming, the director of Forbes Russia, and whose position was one
of non-interference in editorial policy. Now the new owner says that Forbes
Russia had become ‘too politicised’, and would now focus on ‘articles on the
successes of businessmen’. This will happen smoothly, and the average reader won’t
even notice that this is censorship.

Parliamentary
deputies are now discussing how they can make media outlets comparable to
‘foreign agents’, force them to account for their financing from abroad. The
media managers call this behaviour barbaric: information is also a commodity,
it’s bought on subscription by citizens of many countries, and thus a news
agency isn’t able to account for every dollar received from abroad.
Nevertheless, it looks certain that this new law will be passed.

I wouldn’t want to
say that it’s impossible to work in the Russian media, that to write those
texts you think matter is impossible, that Russian journalists are making deals
with their own consciences every day. That’s not how it is. But the fact is
that, as a rule, your average Russian journalist has too many
factors to consider that don’t have anything to do with his or her work—to find information
and present it in an entertaining way.

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